Speakers and Films

The featured speakers and films during the ocean summer event.

Alaska Ocean Festival 2009

Once upon a Tide (9 min)
Center for Global Health at the Harvard School of Medicine
This fantasy fable depicts one girl’s journey to break a mysterious spell that has befallen mankind. In her determination to find a way to break the spell, she travels to the sea, learning along the way how our health and well-being depend on the marine environment. Arriving at her destination, the girl helps us realize how we can all break the spell and save the ocean, and ourselves.

The Secret Weapon (2 min)
Champ Williams
This film maker has an uncanny knack transforming the ocean’s tiniest inhabitants into larger than life characters. This “super short” focuses on the keyhole limpet and a battle with the voracious sunflower star. To survive, the limpet has developed an unlikely defense mechanism that is reminiscent of something out of Hollywood space film.

Hawaiian Showers (5 min)
Astonishing look at coral reef creatures that feed in the most unlikely of places. These feeders give dental hygiene a whole new meaning.

Ice Bears of the Beaufort (10min)
Art C. Smith III & Jennifer Smith
Living among the Polar Bears on Barter Island near Kaktovik Alaska, the film makers have rare access to the year round lives of the great white bear of the North country. In light of the Polar Bear’s rapidly changing habitat, this intimate look into its world is at once timely and revealing.

Lost Jewel of the Atlantic (21 min)
Jacob Holcomb
This is the story of Jardim do Mar. Weaving thrilling big-wave surfing footage with testimony from some of surfing's greatest personalities, Lost Jewel of the Atlantic chronicles one of the world's most significant surf discoveries in decades, and the subsequent battle to prevent its destruction from coastal development.

Proteus (9 min)
Chris Bauer (KQED)
Inventor Ugo Conti turns his struggles with sea sickness into the stuff of which science fiction is made. Seeking to create a vessel that can transport land lubbers free of illness, he develops the ship of the future.

Tim Richardson (American Land Conservancy)
Successful ocean conservation will test environmental advocates' communication skills to a greater degree than most 'green' issues. Consensus building and stakeholder outreach must replace 'values-mongering' and the rhetocial 'blame game' if long range ocean resource sustainability is to be possible in Alaska. Finding the 'win' for people is key to imagining a win for ocean resources.

Guardians of the Sea (12 min)
Tom Pollack
Philanthropist Charles Annenberg Weingarten sets out to unveil the story of Oahu’s legendary lifeguards. Today’s wave runner powered ocean heroes are presented against a backdrop of historical characters who first braved Hawaii’s big breaks.

A Brave New Ocean or an Ocean Revolution? ( 30 min)
Wallace J. Nichols (Bioneers’ Presentation)
Senior scientist at the Ocean Conservancy and ocean activist extraordinaire explains how space-based research and new deep sea technologies have resulted in an explosion of information about the ocean. To change our destructive course we must harness this knowledge, make it accessible to everyone and creatively communicate what the state of the oceans means to the future of life on our planet.

Swimming in Shark Alley (5 min)
Skyler Thomas
Astonished and captivated by the timid calculating behavior of South African great whites, the film team free dives in famed shark alley. Highlights include rare footage of sharks and seals sharing the sea peacefully.

Silent Snow (14 min)
Jan van den Berg
In recent years, Greenland has become a mecca for eco-tourism. Unfortunately, travelers are sadly not alone in their pull toward this majestic land. Chemical residues from all over the world accumulate here invisibly, poisoning humans and animals. Via currents in the ocean and attached to snow, pesticides like DDT are carried northbound into Inuit land, causing illness and premature death. Silent Snow is a documentary project investigating, together with the people who are affected the most, what turns out to be a structural pollution of the entire global environmental system.

Islands in Time: Celebrating 100 Years of Wildlife and Wild Lands along Alaska's Coast
Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge
Islands in Time: Celebrating 100 Years of Wildlife and Wild Lands along Alaska's Coast
In 1909 before Anchorage was even a tent village, Teddy Roosevelt established the first National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska. Who was floating around out there back then to discover and sell President Roosevelt on protecting Alaska's amazing seabird cities? How has this vast refuge, as broad in extent as the entire content, evolved over the years to continue Roosevelt's vision of bird conservation.